The tinkering of the Right Honourable Mr Chris 'Underwhelming' Luxon continues.
What does he do? He rightly - although it was likely Minister Erica Stanford - identified we have a crisis in education. We don't do maths very well, and the majority of our young teenagers are failing.
What's the expectation from the public? The National Government will act strongly to fix it. They picked up votes and donations off the back of this.
So a year after the big issue was dropped on us, National came up with the tiniest of responses. $2m for a trial of 2000 maths stragglers in 2025, and let's see if we can roll it out much later next year.
Could it be any smaller?
We gave seven times more to Samoa to look at climate change and 12 times as much to Mike King's 'Gumboot Friday', so when these kids fail maths, he can find them a counsellor.
$2m is nothing - chump change.And we'll be close to the election before we will know if and what might happen after the pilot.
While this small move is welcome, where on earth has the concern been until now?
Why have we been spending billions every year reinforcing the failure?
Why has the Ministry and successive Governments frowned at our failures for years and been benign at best when it comes to coming up with a plan to sort it?
Why do we spend billions of dollars and somehow just hope it will get better? It won't and it isn't.
In many ways, to do nothing about the issue is not only state-sponsored negligence of our children, but it also shows a loose approach to the $21.4b that goes into education every year.
Who is auditing whether it's making a difference?
I feel like our kids are guinea pigs in the system that chops and changes.
This is now all our problem. And like so many of our approaches, we know the issues but we are so slow in finding a way to fix it.
We didn't suddenly get bad at maths - it's been a trend.
What we need is a serious cultural shift on why we must strive for higher standards, why we go to school, how we use our time there, and it has to seriously test us.
Hand out more homework, let people fail, that's how you learn. Making it easy to pass is corrupt and dishonest, let's strive for excellence again. I think we have lost that.
NCEA DOESN'T STACK UP
NCEA is a laughing stock, it’s a holiday camp. One senior leader of a top Auckland secondary school told me everyone must pass, have fun, and not feel like it was too tough - their feelings must be encouraged.
We have wrapped our kids up in cotton wool, spoon-fed them, and placed them into bed with a phone and milk and cookies ready for Mummy to drop them at the gate in the morning.
One young man I know got 100 percent in NCEA maths but just 5% in Cambridge maths - NCEA is too easy. Cambridge is not.
MORE HOMEWORK ANYONE?
The most successful students do the most homework and it’s compulsory in all the countries that do well. Singapore, Japan , China, Russia and France all have students and schooling systems that are heavily disciplined, very rules-based and they all do up to 10 hours a week studying from home.
Take Singapore, roughly speaking they must do nine to ten hours a week. That's 40 hours a month more than our kids. Little wonder they're smart - an education is such a privilege.
In many countries it's either blocked, too expensive or they're locked out because of other issues like distance.
The real world is going to bite the backsides of our young people. We aren't preparing them properly. Their feelings concern us more than academic achievements - we need to fix it.
I asked two 14 year olds today how much homework they got, one said "f*ck all", the other said "not much" .. same thing really.
Even Matthew Ridge, long time education commentator and All Black, who now lives in France, said his young kids do hours of homework and our system is ''poked and fallen behind". Ridge says our schools appear fixated on average.
In short, we are not pushing our kids and as a result the gap between their achievement and other bright young adults across the globe is still widening. Our schools are hit and miss on homework, it's all over the show, some say it's compulsory, others don't care.
Our kids appear too cool and too busy on social media, addicted to themselves and the fake universe we have created for them which is going to backfire if we don't change - seriously.
This may well be dismissed as a grumpy old white guy spouting off about our lame Education Ministry's lack of success, but it’s more than that.
This is about educating young Kiwis to a higher standard, making them think critically and analytically - it's crucial.
It’s a giant issue and here's hoping the pilot study works . But we will have to, in time, throw people and money at it so it matches the level of the crisis.
Remember when you drive past a school and the sign says 88% NCEA pass rates, keep driving, as employers are finding - it doesn't mean jack in the real world.
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